After 24 hours, Disney Plus has reached 10 million subscribers, according to The Walt Disney Company. This is a good start and this could explain why there were more reports of Disney Plus problems when the service launched in the US, Canada and the Netherlands on November 12.
Public demand is certainly one of the reasons Disney has won so many tickets quickly, but there are two or three other reasons why this number is so high. For one thing, there's a 7-day free trial so you don't have to spend € 6.99 a month, at least not right away. At the same time, Verizon customers can get one year Disney Plus free with some 4G, 5G and private internet packages.
However, this does not mean that Disney Plus is not a major attraction in itself. Launching with a huge catalog of Disney titles, Pixar movies, Star Wars sagas, and 16 Marvel movies was always going to be a big problem. Globally, if you want a quick comparison, Netflix had 158 million subscribers, including free trials, in July 2019, so Disney still has a long way to go. But it also has the rest of the world to go: the next release will take place in Australia and New Zealand on November 19.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Disney will not release any more Disney Plus subscriber numbers outside of its quarterly calls. This means that we will have the next update in February 2020.
How is compared?
Netflix has about 60 million users in the United States, which is only a fraction of this important number. Meanwhile, Hulu announced in May to have more than 28 million subscribers in the United States. HBO Max, armed with the rights to Friends and launched next May, hopes to capture 50 million subscribers by 2025. One of the strangest is Amazon: it does not release official Prime Video figures.
Disney, for its part, is apparently targeting between 60 and 90 million Disney Plus users worldwide after five years.